


A cretaceous wedding - or the story how Rex and Lester managed to save Connor and Abby's reception from a complete disaster

by pirategirljack



Category: Primeval
Genre: Fluff, Post-Series, Wedding, reception
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 22:54:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4684325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just what it says on the tin!</p>
            </blockquote>





	A cretaceous wedding - or the story how Rex and Lester managed to save Connor and Abby's reception from a complete disaster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ohgress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ohgress/gifts).



> At least two chapters!

The wedding was beautiful, if someone were to force Lester to pick a word to describe it. Of course, he wouldn’t have said that out loud, good lord, no. And he’d of course, been asked to officiate, which he was not surprised by but was in fact quite touched to actually hear. Though he’d made Connor work for it.

“C’mon, Lester, be a pal,” Connor had said, weeks before the decided date, when they were meant to be on their way to an anomaly and leaving him alone to do his job.

“And exactly when, pray tell, have I ever ‘been a pal’ as you so eloquently put it?”

“Well, you know, always. You’ve always been there for us, old Lessie, haven’t you? Abby and me, you waited two years for us when you should’ve thought we were dead, and found us places to live when we got back, and gave us our jobs back and everything, didn’t you? That’s got to mean something. And we’re grateful, always have been, I was just saying to Abby last week, ‘we should let Lester officiate the wedding’ and she said ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way’ in that way that she has, you know, where the edge of her mouth turns down a little because she’s trying not to look like she’s humoring you, but really she thinks you’re an idiot, but in a cute and really very charming way--but that’s not the point.”

Lester could see Connor winding up for another run-on sentence, and they’d almost run out of hallway for him to escape down or for Connor to chase him down, so he’d said yes mostly to get the man going and buy himself some personal space--and found afterward that he quite liked the title officiant, and was actually quite flattered.

He weouldn’t have been surprised if nothing had actually happened, and they’d never actually made it to anything resembling a wedding, but they’d all come together to help Abby and Connor pay for it, since their unfortunate joblessness in the Cretaceous meant they had no funds of their own, even now. Jess and Emily had handled Abby’s party and the decorating--not, as Connor had wanted, a science fiction theme, as they all lived a rather science-fictional shared life as it was, but a nice understated elegance. Matt and Becker had taken Connor to a pub a good three days before and promptly drank him under the table, for which he’d needed the following two days to recover. For a time, it seemed he wouldn’t ever sober up, and then for a time after that, Abby had been convinced he’d never deliver his lines, but he showed up on time--for once--and the wedding went off without a hitch.

At the ARC, of course, space graciously donated by himself, and many of the on-duty employees attending. Not many of them had much in the way of friends outside these walls, anyway, and this job--this profession--is why Abby and Connor met to begin with, so it seemed appropriate.

“Funny,” Matt said as the reception started, “I kinda expected something to crop up and ruin the weddin’.”

Lester had a sudden urge to knock on wood to ward off such bad luck, but he mastered himself. Couldn’t have the underlings seeing his weakness. As if they hadn’t already. “Quite,” was all he said.

So of course, that’s when the anomaly opened in the middle of the grassy slope they’d set up for the dancing.

He should have knocked on that wood after all.

The warning alarm went off, people screamed, and his team members, all in beautiful dresses and exquisitely cut suits he himself had seen to, jumped into action--and the anomaly closed. It had been open all of fifteen or thirty seconds.

“Unusual,” Lester said, and everyone looked at him for leadership, obviously torn between continuing the party and doing their jobs. It almost warmed his heart. 

But Abby still had her veil on, and Connor had lipstick on his cheek from where she’d been kissing him, and Lester had once been young and in love at his wedding, and he was not so hard that he couldn’t see that they should have their moment. 

“Stay,” he said, “dance. Enjoy yourselves. I’ll...I’ll be right back.” And as hastily as he could move without it seeming alarming or untoward, Lester went back inside and headed straight for the control center and the bank of screens there. 

The alarms were done, but something was telling him that this isn’t how things like this worked; he was unsure whether it was the continued ringing in his ears from the fifteen seconds of klaxon blaring just next to his ear--he really must be more careful where he stands from here forward--or if he’d only been running this infernal place for so long that he’d developed some sense of intuition about it, but there it was, nagging at him as he went through the halls to the computer.

Jess was already there. “Oh. Lester. I was just--”

“Doing your job, yes. Dedicated.” He squinted at the screens, but there wasn’t anything he could see that wasn’t what it should have been. “Report, kindly.”

“It was the shortest anomaly we’ve recorded since we came online. It doesn’t seem to have let anything through--and I’m sure we would have seen it if it had, since there were so many people around it, of course--and we couldn’t get a lock on where--when-- it connected to before it went unstable and collapsed.”

“Hmm,” he said, and he could feel his face falling into the lines this assignment had inscribed upon his once smooth skin, the ones made from frowning in perplexed silence he wouldn’t admit was perplexed. “Go back to the party, Jess. I’ll stay here for a little longer and be sure there’s nothing amiss.”

She gave him a look that irked him because it was more than accurate, the sort that plainly said that if something actually were amiss, he would be much less likely than her or Connor to have seen it on the dozens of readouts before it became somewhat more than just amiss, but she was kind enough to smooth it out and leave it at that.

He sat in her seat, and his hands hovered over the keyboard, but he didn’t touch anything--and wouldn’t, until such time as he had to. He was the one who oversaw, from the safe distance of his glass-walled office, not the one who stayed here and kit keys. But still…

A chitter and a flap, and just long enough to identify that those things did not, in fact, mean he was about to be devoured by something horrible, and Rex landed on the edge of the desk, knocking over some of the techy bits there.

Lester muttered something about what could happen to insufferable creatures with no decorum as he stooped to pick up the things and get them back on the desk--when the computer beeped and startled him enough to make him bump himself on the underside of the desk.

“What in the everloving…”

Rex chirped again, and fluttered quite delicately to the back of the chair, making Lester feel as if he’d knocked everything over on purpose before. Something was blinking on one of the screens.

Something was definitely amiss.

The blinking thing was a locator on a map of the ARC, and it was headed toward the party. Whatever else could be said about Lester, he never wanted it said that he didn’t respect the sanctity of getting entirely drunk with one’s friends. And besides, he had told them to go back to the party. That he felt more than a little responsible for. And it had been some time, but he still fully remembered two years without Abby and Connor and how heavy the guilt of that had been. He owed them.

Which he would also never say out loud.

“Well, Rex, it appears it’s up to us.” 

Rex chirped and launched himself from the back of the chair, setting it to spinning, only seconds after Lester managed to vacate it before being wing-flapped or tail-whipped or suffered to some other indignity. He grabbed a handheld tracker and moved to intercept the blinking dot, a path that took him through the top of the atrium. The dot was not moving quickly and the intruder alerts hadn’t gone off, so he took a moment to look down on the party. Abby was laughing so hard as Connor spun her around and dunked her that even from here Lester could see her cheeks flushing. Emily was attempting to teach Matt some jig or some such, and failing because he was standing as perfectly straight as ever and looking at her with what Lester imagined was some bemusement, though knowing them, was likely actually that starstruck look people in love always seemed to have. Jess and Becker were dancing, too, though they were moving much slower than everyone else and seemed about as besotted as high schoolers at their first dance. If he was down there with them, he would have said something about the sweetness making his teeth rot. Here, alone, he let a small smile show, and, unaccountably, wondered what Cutter and Jenny Lewis would have looked like here.

Which dried the smile right up.

The beeping on the handheld changed tone, and he looked up to see Matt coming toward him, but a different Matt, scorched and bloody, limping and dragging his foot--and coming from a direction that would have been entirely impossible to arrive from at the party. Lester snapped his gaze back to the party just long enough to see that Matt was, indeed, still at the party, before clamping his eyes back on his new visitor.

Who promptly disappeared without so much as a flicker of anomaly.

“Bugger,” he said.


End file.
